I was not intentionally set out to write books for children, but I was inspired to do so after struggling to face the challenges brought on by my illness—multiple brain tumors and surgeries. Creating messages through stories for children facing such hardship as a life-threatening illness, at times even brought me the reason I needed to keep fighting for my health and for my life.
I was very pleased to read that book. It comforts us to know that the people we lost are living through us, through our actions I share the author's view that the world we live in is not our home. Like the author, I think we're just passing through this world, which means we will all see each other again when the time comes.
Till We Meet Again is a story about death & grieving for children. This book provides comfort to families when they experience the loss of a loved one. The book is meant to help a grieving child remember and share their special memories with those around them, to help them grow to see how they can honor and cherish their loved ones through their own actions. Much love and hope has been poured into this book to help young children deal with loss and provide hope that someday we will all meet again.
I’ve loved fairytales, myths, and history since childhood. After graduating with honors in Russian and Chinese history, I’ve been researching and writing for decades. My work ranges from educational materials to award-winning nonfiction books for children on the theme of heroism. I’ve traveled the world, partly for research, but mostly out of a passion for discovery. My last nonfiction work was a book about women writers. I also penned a historical trilogy that started out as one book, plotted out when I was eighteen. It grew. And, returning full circle to my first loves, my most recent book for children is a traditional Buddhist tale from ancient India.
This book was my introduction to Australian literature. I loved its eloquent evocation of a world totally new and mysterious to its characters. Although I was vaguely familiar with Australia’s penal colony past and with the destruction wrought on Aboriginal lives and culture, this book brought it home. I deeply appreciated the way it took me into the minds of men and women, most of them well-meaning but ignorant, and showed me how they missed the point of where they were and how to thrive there. The tragedy of that ignorance resonates with me, since I see it all around the world.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2006 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC DUBLIN PRIZE
London, 1806. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly.
His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. Soon Thornhill, a man no better or worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life.
I come from the Dusun hilltribes of Indigenous Borneo. My mountain is Kinabalu, and my river is Kiulu. My upbringing gives me a new way to talk about the world. I have participated in ongoing rituals, witnessed the loss of once-abundant wilderness, and shared in stories that are filled with ancient wisdom. My Elders’ knowledge about the land, sea, and sky is etched in my memory, grounding me to cultural roots and prompting reflection on life’s essential questions. In my travels, I have found that these universal questions intersect with the stories and experiences of Indigenous communities worldwide. This worldview urges me to not let these stories fade.
Poetry like this is crucial to telling the other side of the story. It’s a counternarrative, and that’s why Oodgeroo’s work has shaped my thinking and experiences in life-affirming ways.
Oodgeroo sees her work as an extension of the songkeeping and oral storytelling so intrinsic to Indigenous social life and survival. Her poems are not simply about a bygone past, as every line is relevant today (but hush, you mustn’t say so, Oodgeroo teases). That’s why I treasure her wit and writing – they give me life, a lifeline to a reality often denied us in Western thought.
It is written with so much beauty, elegance, and hope. Full of love for her people and full of grace, passion, and rage. Because there is so much to rage about (but that is another story)…
Oodgeroo’s writing has a unique place in Australian literature. When her poetry was first published in the 1960s, Kath Walker, as she was known then, provided a brave new voice for marginalised Aboriginal Australians. For the first time, an Aboriginal Australian was analysing and judging white Australians as well as her own people. She often made provocative and passionate pleas for justice:
We want hope, not racialism, Brotherhood, not ostracism, Black advance, not white ascendance: Make us equals, not dependants.
This collection of poetry and prose is a reminder of Oodgeroo’s contribution to Indigenous culture and the journey…
I love sport. I played my last game of cricket when I was 69 and, as I approach my eightieth year, I continue to play golf, confusing my partners by switching from right to left hand when chipping and putting. I like watching sport but prefer to spectate via television rather than being there. I confess I do not fully understand American sports: I cannot fathom why a hit over the fence in baseball can score 1, 2, 3, or 4 rather than the undisputed 6 of cricket; and, while I admire the strategies of American football, I wonder why a ‘touchdown’ does not actually involve touching down.
Indigenous populations too have had a raw deal: from settlers who took their land and from those who felt they knew what was best for them. Although among the lesser sinners, sports historians have disregarded their traditional sports and focussed on their participation in sports imposed on them by invading powers. In contrast, Australian Aborigines feature in Roy Hay’s book as sportspersons in their own right. Hay shows that they were human beings who performed a constructive role in Australia’s sporting history. He does this not as a woke, bleeding heart academic but as a historian determined to unearth the ‘true’ story of Aboriginal participation in Australian Rules Football. As an Australian citizen I wanted to read this story.
This book will revolutionise the history of Indigenous involvement in Australian football in the second half of the nineteenth century. It collects new evidence to show how Aboriginal people saw the cricket and football played by those who had taken their land and resources and forced their way into them in the missions and stations around the peripheries of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. They learned the game and brought their own skills to it, eventually winning local leagues and earning the respect of their contemporaries. They were prevented from reaching higher levels by the gatekeepers of the domestic…
In the early days of my PhD degree at King’s College London, my research focused very much on developing a Marxist theory of International Relations. From this, I have learned invaluable knowledge that informs my post-PhD writings. These focus more on the study of US-China relations in the context of a changing world order. I have always been passionate about these subjects in so far as they allow me to make sense of the big picture.
As a student of international order, I enjoy reading history from a very long-term perspective. This book – which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 – offers just that by providing an overview of the origins of society and relations of power, answering big questions about why there are socio-economic differences between regions of the world, the impact of geography and nature on technological development, and the implications of human footprint on the planet.
While this book is a bit of an outlier in this list when it comes to US-China relations, it helps us think in terms of how US hegemony, like the overtake of Europe over Asia, has mostly been an accident in history—and a temporary one, as China’s rise shows.
'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens
Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? And what can it teach us about our current crisis?
Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.
An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science that can provide expert insight into our modern world.
I’m a professional history nerd who is perennially interested in both sides of the history coin: What happened? How do we know? I’ve got a PhD in sixteenth-century European history, have written articles that cover things from antiquity to Vikings in America, and have written several history books about Australia and its region. I like history that is robust, so I’m always looking for books that make clever use of sources. And I love stories that disrupt preconceptions, so I enjoy researching and writing and reading histories that make you think.
If the British empire’s first historians had a knack for anything it was omitting to mention what some of what their predecessors did for the sake of empire. Aboriginal Convicts is one of those books that really challenges us to rethink the stories we have received about British colonization. By tracing the lives of Indigenous people in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand who were sentenced to transportation as convicts this groundbreaking book turns the table on the way we see Britain’s empire in the nineteenth century.
When most of us imagine an Australian convict we see an Englishman or an Irish lass transported for stealing a loaf of bread or a scrap of cloth. Contrary to this popular image, however, Australian penal settlements were actually far more ethnically diverse, comprising individuals transported from British colonies throughout the world.
As Kristyn Harman shows in Aboriginal Convicts, there were also a surprising number of indigenous convicts transported from different British settlements, including ninety Aboriginal convicts from all over Australia, thirty-four Khoisan from the Cape Colony (South Africa) and six Maori from New Zealand.
As someone who grew up in Australia without any gay literary characters to relate to, I’m incredibly passionate about queer stories set in our beautiful country. We now have a wealth of brilliant books by LGBTQ+ authors, and I hope that by sharing my recommendations, our stories find even more of the readers they’re meant to find. I’ve focused on books featuring gay male protagonists, as that’s how I identify, and they’re the type of queer stories I relate to the most. Some of the books are fiction, others are memoir, some are written for teens and others are for adults, but all of them share an incredible level of authenticity.
This is a heartwarming contemporary story about a gay Aboriginal teen exploring his sexuality and falling in love for the first time, set against the vivid backdrop of a fictional, rural Indigenous community. It’s evocative and heady and compelling. It’s one of those stories that makes you want to reach into the book and hug all the characters and tell them everything is going to be okay. Such an important story from a brilliant new voice in Australian YA.
SHORTLISTED: 2022 CBCA Book of the Year, Older Readers
'I don't paint so much anymore,' I say, looking to my feet.
'Oh. Well, I got a boy who needs to do some art. You can help him out,' Aunty Pam says, like I have no say in the matter, like she didn't hear what I just said about not painting so much anymore. 'Jackson, this is Tomas. He's living with me for a little while.'
It's a hot summer, and life's going all right for Jackson and his family on the Mish. It's almost Christmas, school's out, and he's hanging…
I’m someone who has had a lot of pets in my life––dogs, fish, birds, turtles, tortoises––which means I’m also someone who has had a lot of pets in my life die, because the worst thing about pets is they don’t live as long as we do. I spent ten years writing Good Grief, but really, I’ve been researching Good Grief my whole life, ever since my first pet died. This list includes some classics I loved when I was a kid, and some newer titles that I learned about while researching Good Grief. All are wonderful and will be a balm during a hard time.
This is another great picture book about the death of a non-dog/cat pet––in this Mem Fox classic, the pirate Tough Boris loses his dear pet parrot.
This book is especially wonderful though because it shows how even the toughest of tough guys––and Tough Boris is a tough pirate––can absolutely fall to pieces when a pet dies. It’s okay to cry about an animal dying––even if you are a pirate!
The really beautiful thing about this story though is seeing how Tough Boris copes with the loss through making friends with a stowaway boy on his ship, because if I’ve learned one thing from my pets dying, it’s that you need the support and love of other people to help you through the loss.
Boris von der Broch is a mean, greedy old pirate - tough as nails, through and through, like all pirates. Or is he? For when Boris'' parrot dies, the tough pirate is reduced to tears'
I’m a fantasy author and mythologist who studies myth’s place in culture, history, and heritage conservation. To finish my doctorate, I moved from Seattle to Galway, Ireland and never left. Myth and folklore permeate the landscape around me as well as my day-to-day life. After grad school I returned to my first love, fiction, with all the knowledge and passion that came from the better part of a decade spent studying mythology. When I’m not writing, I spend my time exploring 5000-year-old tombs or practicing Fiore (14th century Italian sword fighting) with my husband. The Serpent and the Swan is the debut fairy tale in a much larger series.
Folklore and nature conservation is a subjects close to my heart. When I met my husband, an ecologist, many of our first conversations were on the importance of narrative to get people interested in conservation efforts. Folklore is the perfect tool.
This book does that job beautifully. As a piece of narrative nonfiction, it collects fairy tales, personal memoirs, and natural history in a lyrical journey through the forests of England. Maitland centers each chapter on an English woodland and the stories associated with it, be they fairy tales or history. More importantly, she discusses not only how myth shapes culture, but how landscape shapes myth. I reference it time and again not only as an academic, but as an author who creates worlds rich in landscape and folklore.
Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke a similar sensation in us - we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying.
In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of the fairytales made famous by the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood. Maitland…
I’m a Pom, as Aussies would say, born and bred in England to an Australian mother and British father. I emigrated to Australia as a ten-pound Pom way back when and though I eventually came home again I’ve always retained an affection and a curiosity about the country, which in time led me to write three books about my own family history there. The early days of colonial Australia, when around 1400 people, half of whom were convicts, ventured across the world to found a penal colony in a country they knew almost nothing about, is one of the most fascinating and frankly unlikely stories you could ever hope to come across.
A bold and broad-sweeping book, written in the 1940s, described as a novel but featuring a mix of real and fictional characters, The Timeless Land is a beautifully imaginative telling of the arrival of the First Fleet in what became Sydney in 1788, as seen through the eyes of the Aboriginal people, the Governor and his officers, convicts and the odd settler. The depiction of the part-real, part-invented Aboriginal people may cause raised eyebrows nowadays, but the book is based on thorough research and written with great imagination and sensitivity. I love the mix of the real and the imaginary, while never distorting the facts. It’s a brilliant way to paint a vivid portrait of a subject, I’ve done it myself (if I may be presumptuous enough to bracket myself with Ms. Dark).
An outstanding literary achievement, meticulously researched and deeply felt, this portrait of the earliest days of the European settlement of Australia remains unrivalled. the year 1788: the very beginning of European settlement. these were times of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all, they were times of conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers. Eleanor Dark brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. the cast of characters includes figures historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler. All the while, beneath the veneer of British civilisation, lies the baffling presence…
